Water: don’t matter what brits thought, they lost. But, according to the USA, that was our legal separation, so it was a legal doc., no more taxes sent to GB, etc. 
Yeee-ouch!
Perhaps I can clarify what I meant.
There is a difference between Protection and Oppression.
Children (and certain other groups, usually those suffering significant mental illness or disability) are given special protections.
To offer a couple of examples, children are prevented form entering into contracts (such as hire purchase) because we judge (rightly or wrongly) that they are not competent to make the best decision in their own interests. I would suggest that “age of consent” exists for a similar reason, it is not intended to oppress children, but rather to protect them from manipulation and exploitation. Child labour laws also serve a similar purpose.
I not believe that I suggested that it was OK to ascribe different legal status to “schizzies”. Your arguments in this forum appear demonstrably coherent and indicative of an active and able mind.
This difference in legal status is (or should be) based on a judgement that specific individual people are not sufficiently mentally able or mature to look after themselves or bear the same rights and responsibilities that are expected of ordinary adults.
I tend to agree that the designation of children as “minors” based solely on age runs counter to this. It is interesting (at least to me) to note that children may be judged to be adults under the law when they have commited “adult” crimes, but they are not judged adult enough to sign a contract no matter their personal maturity, and as a former child myself I do see that as a glaring double standard.
No such criticism was intended, and I apologise if I implied otherwise. The DoI itself is not a document with which I am overly familiar – living as I do in part of the world which has yet to declare independance from Brittania. 
No, I can’t. Each age’s social norms are just that.
When the DoI was written, slavery was still a norm – although going out of style; Women were largely kept barefoot and pregnant.
In England at least, children were often not named until they had grown up a bit, so many died young that calling them “baby” probably helped ease the pain. Older children pulled coal carts down mine pits in spaces that were too small for adults, and if you were caught stealing you were likely to get a 2 minute trial before “the beak” before being transported to the colonies for 10 years.
When the framer’s of the DoI made claims that were “self evident” all their cultural baggage went along with it.
I would certainly hope that in line with our “enlightened” social norms, any exclusion of people from equal rights should require both contemplation and defence.
Kind Regards,
Martin
I’d like to jump into the discussion of the legal effect of the Declaration of Independence. My understanding is that it is a legal document, but a legal document that is primarily concerned with international law, not domestic law.
As others have noted, the primary purpose of the Declaration was to end the legal ties with the U.K., and to create a new international entity. Since international law is made by a combination de facto situations (such as a successful armed revolution), and de jure principles (such as recognition of the new status by other countries like France, in this case), it didn’t take immediate effect as a matter of international law. But, it did eventually have status as a document with legal effect in international law.
It also had effect on U.S. domestic law. For example, under colonial law, the British Parliament was supreme over colonial legislatures, and could override any colonial law. The Declaration, once it was made good on the battlefield and through diplomacy, ended that legal relationship and substituted a new one, of sovereignty for the individual states.
One example of the different way the Declaration worked in international law and U.S. domestic law relates to the date of U.S. independence. Under U.S. domestic law, the U.S. gained independence on July 4, 1776. Under British domestic law, it dates from the British recognitiion of U.S. independence with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. That difference actually had some significance at the time, as issues such as a change of citizenship by American colonials as a result of independence would be recognized differently in the American courts and the U.K. courts.
There’s an excellent book entitled Vindicating the Founders which addresses the points raised by the OP.
Does it really matter what they wrote then? The point is that everyone is free now. And the fact that most of the representatives in the Continental Congress were from the northern states, such as massachusetts, new york, etc. And yes slavery was an issue at the time. I can almost guarantee that the people in the north heavily disagreed with those representative from the southern states and it finaly grew into the civil war. But my entire point is that 1)The decleration of Independence is not a law, but a simple statement in which it says that all men should be treated equally. 2)The representatives also saw it as a right for southerners to carry on buissness freely, which included slavery. The decleration was also written for trade free from limitations and heavy taxes from the British. Why then would the newly formed U.S.A barage southerners with all these limitations? It is true that slavery is a very gloomy part of American history, and i’m glad that it was ended. The Emancipation Proclamation came slightly late, but it came. We can’t change the past, so why complain about it?
Did the Brits lose or did they have more pressing matters to attend to?
It’s hard to say. An empire as large as Britain’s is always faced with hard choices about which matters to attend to. Certainly, the North American colonies were one of the most important matters around; we were not some far-flung colony like Diego Garcia or New Zealand (and yes, my timing may be out of whack; fill in some smallish, faraway colony the British had in the late 18th Century to get my meaning). The point is, North America was one of Britain’s most important colonies, so it obviously wasn’t a simple matter of getting distracted.
On the other hand, no colony is as important as the homeland. Britain has been threatened at various times by Continental forces. How threatened were they by enemies or potential enemies (France, bits of the Holy Roman Empire, Spain) in 1776? I can’t remember. Obviously, some pretty heavy wars with France were yet to come - a bunch of Napoleonic Wars, for one, and the obvious example of French intervention in the American independence struggle. And some pretty big wars had just gone by - the Seven Years’ War, which is really a superset of the French and Indian War (the concept of world war was yet to come so there still were different names for different theaters of action). So Britain wasn’t exactly having tea and crumpets with Europe.
So the answer to your question, Asmodeus, is: I don’t know. I would hazard the guess that, if the British were going to save any one colony, they would have picked the 13 in the New World, partly because they felt, reasonably, that the loss of those threatened Canada. (Are you sensing that I don’t know the contemporary names for these colonies? I don’t. I mean, how would a Briton, in 1775, distinguish the uppity colonies of Georgia and Vermont and stuff, from the placid colonies of Newfoundland and neighbors? They were both “British Colonies in the New World”, after all.) This chunk of the answer favors the the British just got whipped in battle (Yorktown and the Chesapeake) thesis.
The other school of thought, as alluded to by Asmodeus, is that the British had other fish to fry. This is based on perfectly rational fears of folks on the restive Continent dying to invade Briton. It wouldn’t be prudent to risk too many people or munitions putting down a lawyers’ rebellion in the New World, if it meant a serious chance of merry old England being invaded. Was there a serious chance? Interesting moot question. It doesn’t matter as long as anybody important believed there was a chance of an anti-Britain coalition forming on the continent. Austria, France, Spain, maybe even Russia. The first three are also largely Catholic. Could this have stoked fears of an atavistic Protestant - Papal conflict sweeping Europe? I dont’ know. But I sure as heck like to speculate!
Asmodeus (an old favorite of mine from the AD&D Monster Manual) wrote:
Well … how about giving teen-agers the rights of adults? You know, by lowering the Age of Majority to, say, 13?
Nobody answered Jeff’s question. George Orwell, in Animal Farm, has the animals set up a list of seven commandments.
**
Later, as the situation deteriorates and the pigs take over the farm, the animals wake up one morning to find that the first seven have been erased, and another commandment has been added:
**
This website has a good summary of the book.